The Internet is becoming a leading source for news. However, the amount of news available through the Internet is overwhelming. Thus, Internet portals and other websites offer so-called personalization to varying degrees. A great deal of active research is being conducted concerning how to improve personalized access to news and other resources. See, Pretschner et al., “Ontology Based Personalized Search,” Proc 11th IEEE Intl. Conf. on Tools with Artificial Intelligence, pp. 391-398, Chicago, November 1999.
Personalization technologies often require creation of a user profile, which is used in the process of filtering information and presenting the filtered information to the user. One common perception in this field is that profile creation should not require significant effort by the user at the risk of alienation and loss of the customer. However, so-called open profiles which include editable user models have been proposed, allowing a user to examine and edit a user profile. See, Ahn et al., “Open User Profiles for Adaptive News Systems: Help or Harm?” International World Wide Web Conference Committee, WWW2007, May 8-12, 2007. In Ahn et al., an editable profile is described based on the display of keywords used in the filtering process. The user is able to add and delete words from the list. Also, the process identifies “top” keywords in articles returned to the user, which enables the user to discover the terms used in the articles, and utilize the information in the process of editing the profile. Ahn et al. found however that his experiment of providing a user the ability to add and remove keywords may harm system and use performance in information retrieval systems. Ahn et al. suggests that user editable profiles might work in systems that have good control over the delivery of cumulative or duplicative articles, which they characterize as good “novelty control”, in the filtering of information to deliver to the users. Ahn et al. found evidence that apparent duplicates in filtered results often led users to amend their profiles in an apparent attempt to eliminate the duplicates, but with poor results.
It is desirable to provide personalization technologies based on open profiles which can be modified by users, in a way that improves the results of the information filtering and presentation systems.
U.S. patent application Ser. No. 12/417,489 filed on Apr. 2, 2009 and published as US 2009/0254838 on Oct. 8, 2009 and U.S. patent application Ser. No. 13/317,031 filed on Oct. 7, 2011 and published as US 2012/0096041 on Apr. 19, 2012 are hereby incorporated herein by reference in their respective entireties.
US 2009/0254838 is directed to a system and method that includes a harvesting tier that ingests content via RSS and converts that content into unique system documents. An analytics tier takes the unique system documents and enriches them with meta data extracted from the document content which meta data is then used to match against channels. Channels act as smart filters, and the relevance a document has to a channel is calculated and represented as a relevancy score. Channels are displayed on a user's graphical user interface (GUI) as both a front page view, which is a summary of all the user's personal interests, as well as a channel view, which displays the most relevant documents for a particular interest context.
US 2012/0096041 is directed to a system and method that allows users to edit and share created channels with other users. Both of these referenced and published applications require that a user expressly subscribe to or create particular channels.